Thank You Ma'am, May I Have Another?

I have always loved men and always hated their power. Too often I've seen them wield it in ways that are cruel, unfair, antagonistic. But recently my perspective on men's power has begun to shift. Now trying to find my old righteous anger is like trying to fake a sneeze. Something's changed, on the order of the momentous. The signs are there: male dominance in business ends in the 1990s. The battle between the sexes is ending. In fact, the sexes themselves may be on the verge of disappearing from corporate wars.

I had my first sniff of change last summer. I was invited to a conference of metabolic princes -- the heads, or maybe the halos, of several of the country's superpower companies. It's the kind of woodsy retreat where everyone's on the cellular and four FedEx trucks arrive each day to keep the 200 attendees feeling important. I was thrilled to be there. I felt I'd been summoned as a Player in her own right.

And then I went to the opening-night barbecue. The covers of Fortune magazine had come to life and assembled in a single field of wildflowers and burning beef. White men, all facing right. I headed toward a group of three men who together could buy and sell half the United States. No prince or king ever held more power. I extended my hand as introductions went around. The potentates glanced at me, ignored my extended hand -- and went on with their conversation.

I looked around. Had I disappeared? The men had treated me as if I were the Venus de Milo on loan from some other rich guy's museum -- a nice piece of background but clearly without a hand to shake. I had disappeared, and so had all the other women. We were in this verdant, smoky field as "guests." That was our official status. We were not there to speak. And no one was there to listen.

In the past, situations like this evoked holy ire in me. But not this time. And not a month later, when I met up with one of the business patriarchs who'd been there and asked him why no powerful women had been invited as full participants.

"Why should I invite women to participate?" he shot back. "They will never have power. It's obvious why. They are either breeders or neuters. If they're breeders, their energy is dissipated onto their children. If they're neuters, they're as good as spayed -- not fit to fight."

The words were those of a gender Nazi. But there was no force behind them. And then he sneered, like a vaudeville villain. "If you ever repeat that outside this room, I'll deny I said it." Of course he would. How could he cling to such an outmoded idea?

The answer, I knew, was simple: men are still clinging to the hope that women are powerless, because they haven't got much else to cling to. The leadership elite in this country is in as much trouble as blue-collar men whose jobs are disappearing, never to return. The leadership elite is finding that power -- the basis of masculinity, control, and prestige -- is also disappearing.

You see this in the darndest places. Talk about being spayed. Penile implants undertaken as "remediation" is the fastest growing category of elective surgery. Dominatrices are doing land-office business. A well-known San Francisco dominatrix tells me that powerful men are desperate to break the compulsion of always having to be in control. CEOs regularly roll themselves under her Manolo Blahnik pumps. It rang true. One CEO I'd pursued for a book (he never signed) said to me, "Ask anything you want of me." "Right," I laughed, "like you'll take orders from me?" He looked surprised. "Of course I will. I love being controlled. It's like being in an airport. I want signs that tell me: go here, go there, eat now, pee later."

I think of myself as a canary in a coal mine. I make my living finding new ideas and putting them into words. I always need to work five years into the future. One of my authors calls me the diva of business publishing, but I don't sing. I listen and absorb. These days, I notice, more and more of the men who come to see me don't want to talk about business. They want to give words to things they don't know, not things they do know. Mostly what they don't know is who they are.

These men have subordinates who insist they keep alive the routines of power. Most have wives they are proud of but can't talk to about their fears and weaknesses. To many, Shanghai is less foreign than love. If they could find the language and the tenderness, they would trade power for love in a heartbeat. Privately, many are asking themselves what kind of power there really is in selling their services or marketing their products or making their end-of-the-year numbers.

A colleague sat in on one of my conferences with a prominent male executive who wanted to talk about writing a book. Afterward she asked, "Do you think he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown?" Maybe the country's entire leadership elite is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Some of these men sound so frail and lost that I have to remind myself that they steer major corporations. If they were driving Amtrak trains, somebody would say to them: Time to come in for a little testing.